God's Scariest Little Army

B and I watched the movie Jesus Camp last Friday. He wanted me to record (ahem, I mean “time shift") it so that we could watch it again but I’d already returned it. So I put it in my Netflix queue and browsed some of the 624 flixters reviews of the movie. Yes, 624. It has to be a record. Obviously this doc really hit a legion of hot-buttons and one or two of my own, so it is the subject of today’s cultural vulturalism.

I found the reviews by the people who claim to be Fundamentalist or Evangelical Christians the most interesting and even unpredictable. One cautioned against letting children watch such potent material. I believe that this is a film parents should watch with kids and be prepared to spend hours discussing. Mine was vocally angry through most of it; his outrage at both the arrogance and manipulation of the budding televangelists were dead on.

He saved particular scorn for the poodle-coiffed, pied piper Becky Fisher and his BS detector pegged each time he recognized the way she used accusation, guilt and catharsis as tactics to break down her impressionable charges or her fast, easy dismissal of young people’s diversity and freedom of thought. I watched, without further comment, because I wanted to hear my son's perceptions uncolored by my own. I only broke my silence twice. The first time to answer his question, “Who are these enemies she’s talking about? I responded, me, you—anybody who doesn’t believe as they do.


I also felt inclined to point out Ted Haggard's sordid history/future after this film was edited. In light of his scandalous "fall from grace" the haggard one’s smarmy on-camera muggings and fatuous protest to the filmmakers seem particularly camp and grotesque, yet strangely reassuring. The dude was high on more than Jesus. Ted was the only person who appeared in the doc whose comportment and convictions seemed insincere from the first note. Gosh, how surprising. The other subjects, scary as we found them, do seem to be without artifice, while Mr. Walk Both Ways Haggard clearly loved his closeup above all.
Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
Proverbs 16:18

Most gratifying for a parent, was my son's shrewd connection of all the military paraphenalia so rapturously embraced by these little soldiers of Christ and how their brand of fundamentalism was as raw and intolerant as anything coming out of the madrases of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. These little crusaders, who are no doubt well-coached to say so, claim that they are spiritual warriors, but in their combat fatigues, fascist-stiff-armed salutes, camouflage war paint and martial kick/punch dancing, seemed less about the beatitudes and more ready to strap on explosives and meet Jesus head on. Body language speaks volumes. So do words.

“There are two types of people – those who love Jesus and those who don’t."

Why would anybody want to make that distinction? Am I reading too much into this to believe that this is exactly the sort of stark duality that sets up two classes of people? Jews. Aryans. Heteros. Homos. Believers. Infidels. Intolerance is always served up two scoops at a time.

Equally chilling was the little girl who approached a couple of African American gentlemen and asked one of them, with barely a how’d do, if he thought he was going to heaven. When the puzzled man answered in the affirmative, she shot back quizzically, “Are you sure?”

Afterwards, she remarked to a friend, “I think he was a Muslim.”

As I said earlier, I was most interested in the responses from the Christian reviewers who expressed ‘that these people are not like us.’ It gives me some comfort to take them at their word, but I would caution them, as I do my moderate Muslim and Jewish friends, that the radical proselytizers and zealots have so thoroughly stolen their show that perhaps they bear some responsibility for rebalancing the scales. Jesus Camp shows just how far all moderates have to go to rebalance the equation of democracy and civil discourse in this country. B made the connection between this film and Stanley Kramer’s glorious Judgment at Nuremberg, which we watched about a month ago. I offered that both films showed that while philosophies of intolerance may begin with monsters, they can only be perpetuated by the bourgeois, respectable, ordinary folks.

As the credits rolled, I turned to my son and quoted Mr. Jefferson’s admonition that “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." He asked me to explain and I told him that this was his generation, that it's clear that the bright, articulate young people he saw in this film are not going to be satisfied preaching on street corners and megachurches, but will march their self-righteous intolerance into the halls of government and when they gain power, will trample on your civil liberties in the name of salvation and persecute anybody they believe to be ungodly. Though people of my generation have created these little mullahs, it will be people of his generation that would have to confront them.

Some of these sparkly eyed little charmers will grow haggard on pharmaceuticals and the temptations of alternative lifestyles. Some of the brightest will succumb to the relentlessly moderating influence of education. But enough will get through the grid that you better be ready, I advised, with activism, knowledge, arguments and convictions just as compelling as theirs. If your generation isn’t up to it, you might end up living in a red white and blue Iranish theocracy and watching your own children say the Christian Pledge of Allegiance in compulsory Jesus Camps. We grew up checking for Reds under our beds. I’m nostalgic for them. Ms. Fisher’s little morality squad is much scarier.

Not that I wasn’t raised with some pretty traditional values--particularly regarding pledging allegiance. The nuns at St. Ursula told us that for an American to pledge allegiance to any but the American flag is treason. Simplistic, but the lesson stuck.

We’re renting Jesus Camp again, for more family viewing and discussion and I would encourage parents of all faiths to not to try to protect their children from such controversial viewing, but encourage it, the better to help their kids become critical thinkers.

The documentary style is as clean and unbiased as anything I’ve ever seen or studied and I thought the choice of Mike Papantonio to provide commentary and counterpoint was particularly well made. Jesus Camp opens a window on a world that people of moderate leanings would rather disavow. People of faith, be they Christians, Muslims or Jews, hurry to distance themselves from such zealotry, but if Jesus Camp teaches anything, it is that silent complicity in such radicalism is like ink in water. It spreads so quickly that before we know it, we’re all stained. The Net says that Jesus Camp has been shut down by its founder in the interest of protecting her young charges. I say this is a hydra, with more heads than you can possibly imagine.

Keep the faith.

-@V@-

Skating on the Superficial

Rescuing Masculinity for What It's Worth

I’m reading The Road with my 13 year old. We’re about two-thirds through it and I pretty much know how it’s going to end. My boy snuck a look at the ending and he says he also knows the outcome. But we press on—a chapter a night. There’s not a lot of plot, suspense or character arc here. This doesn’t bother me. Maybe it deserves a Pulitzer, maybe not. Maybe this isn’t the best book I’ve read, not even this year, but I’m glad to be reading it and glad to be reading it with my son. I certainly don’t think it deserved the round pounding it received from the Inky’s book critic.

I had my boy read the withering review to me early last week and I was kinda surprised when young Master W. agreed with Mr. Wilson’s critique of McCarthy’s narrative conventions, but not with his overall assessment of the book. Sure, of the short list of people who did it both first and best, McCarthy will never out-hem Hemingway, or fitz Fitzgerald, but The Road isn’t exactly the facile fast food sizzler of Love Story or Celestine Prophecy ilk, despite the fact that it’s being hawked at Oprah’s Book Club, right beneath a chastely voluptuous (but yummy) “Bras of Summer” banner ad.

Despite a million little pieces of egg on her face, a flyover the big O’s site reveals titles like As I Lay Dying, A Hundred Years of Solitude and Anna Karenina. Her O’ness seems almost self-consciously intent on steering her tube fed demographic toward big L literature. Years from now, inquiring minds may yet debate whether The Road deserves such a capital letter—whether it was oracular or just apocryphal goth. But it deserves whatever attention it gets, then or now, because The Road has grit.

I must confess I hadn’t know Cormac McCarthy’s work very well. I haven’t even google-imaged him yet because I’m savoring my precognitions. I want to see how my image of him jibes with the real deal. With celebrities, I find the reality mostly pales measured next to my preconceptions. I want a ruddy-headed, freckled David Caruso meets Charles Bukowski type. Craggy face. Pockmarks. A drinker's nose. Except that the title All the Pretty Horses is a bit of a discordant note. Kinda fem, more suited to a Dominique or an Emilie than a Cormac. I start all my journeys on the most superficial of terms. What do I know?

Ok, curiosity got the better of me. The last link didn’t exist before I wrote the previous sentence. And now I’m a little disappointed. The romanticized Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. is replaced with a www reality thumbnail. He looks a bit more clipped and buttoned down than I thought he would. Ex-USAF. He still doesn’t look like a “pretty horses” kinda guy, but it still makes sense. He makes sense. I understand his protagonist’s relationship with his son in this ghostly, monochromatic world they’re passing through. The dying man lives for only one thing. Love for the boy. The kind of love that kills without blinking to protect him. The kind of love that would die, with a song in its heart, rather than see the child hurt. It’s a fierce, joyful animal thing. It starts when you see them pulled out of their momma and placed before you on the warming table. It hasn’t diminished an iota in all these years. Twenty-first century life is overstuffed, supersized. It’s easy for the love between a father and a son to get lost in all the chromatic distractions of a life with so many choices.

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

In pre-apocalyptic America, young men without models (from literature or real life) of how to be a man, turn to mass media and encounter two polar and equally loathsome caricatures—the neo-Neanderthal, misogynist, hip hop blingmeister and the emasculated, marginalized, post-modern milquetoast failure. Both leave one with the cheesy slide from masculinity to machismo to misomania. Alas in the 21st Century our spears have been beaten into laptops. Our questions of survival are more existential than literal. Men are still going off to the woods, beating on drums and trying to reconstitute their masculinity through metaphors. Masculinity’s virtues seem virtually, but not entirely extinct. Without actually going to war, we get precious few chances to be warriors. Save in the loving of our children. Cormac and I are together on that.

Wilson snipes at the scientific credibility of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic limbo. The Inquirer critic calls The Road “just the latest installment in the pornography of despair.” Possibly, because I’m reading it to a 13 year old, the phrase hit me with the impact of a slab of raw liver to the puss.

Master Weiss: What are we reading tonight, Dad?
Mister Weiss: I thought we’d indulge in some more of that pornography of despair, son.
Master Weiss: Gosh dad, aren’t I a little young for that?
Mister Weiss: No son, once you get acclimated to the harder stuff, you realize that Tolkien, Rowling, Twain, Lewis, Lessing, Lem and all the rest of the ones we’ve read over the years are just pantywaists and poofters. No more soft-core depression or Hollywood endings for you me bucko. Time to break out the Vonnegut. `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Master Weiss: Dad, your rant is cutting into my read time.
Mister Weiss: Okay.

Wilson utterly misses the point. Veracity, color and hope don’t live in landscapes, favorable outcomes or even in language, but in the relationship. Let’s pray it doesn’t take a cataclysm to make either the point or the men of my generation willing and holy warriors for our children. If we can’t do that, then we are not men. Happy 13th Birthday, B.
-@V@-

Notes on Brecht's Galileo and the Schism Between Science and Popular Culture

Philadelphia's innovative Wilma Theater is currently running a successful and critically acclaimed version of Berthold Brecht's classic Galileo. As somebody who has made a living interpreting the writings of scientists and technologists for wider audiences, I can attest that the divide this play illuminates is great. We children of the "Space Race" might tend to dismiss this as a contemporary phenomenon, the product of a science illiterate, short attention span society. Galileo affirms that the enmity is both longstanding and near intractable. I did see and in fact participated in creating the video design for an ambitious experimental production of the play by the Villanova players about 18 years ago. My younger brother, who was doing masters work there at the time was cast as the Furious Monk. Little did we know that the slow mill of the Church in the guise of Pope JP II would grind out an apology three hundred years in the making, a scant three years later. But it didn’t take long for the spin doctors to recast Galileo’s falling out with the Church as one of the scientist’s personal hubris rather than of repression of scientific inquiry and freedom of thought. Galileo was censured, not because he was right, but because he had the temerity to insist that he was right. Right?

If you're casting about for modern Galileos though, you needn't look any further than the discipline of climatology. It makes you wonder what tools of intimidation the 21st Century Church of Capitalism used to compel the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists to tone down/remove some of their more dire, graphic and perhaps most compelling global warming projections from their recent report. I heard a little blurb about it on the BBC about a month ago, then stone cold silence since. I’d like to see what they left off the May 2007 report. Why isn’t the public clamoring for the unexpurgated version? Maybe they even know where the bees are.

Even Edge.com which I’ve subscribed to for about a year doesn't have a lot about the subject, but do check out neurobiologist William Calvin’s short take on this unreported story, a piece of which I quote here:

Our ancestors lived through a lot of these abrupt climate changes, and some humans will survive the next one. It's our civilization that likely won't, just because the whiplashes happen so quickly that warfare over plummeting resources leaves a downsized world where everyone hates their neighbors for good reason.

Disturbed by the immorality and injustice of our current military adventurism? Just you wait. The future wars for water and food will make our dirty little “oil war” an Audie Murphy cakewalk in comparison.

In exactly this vein, my 13 year old son and I watched Children of Men together, arguably one of the most brilliant films I’ve seen in a decade, a film which greater thinkers than I take as allegory for nature’s revenge for the assault of humans. My B said that he wished I hadn’t showed it to him, that it was the scariest film he’d ever seen and that he found it deeply disturbing. His response saddened me. I’ve never felt more ashamed for our generation, the first generation that knows the score and still chooses to ignore it. Kurt Vonnegut (RIP) said it even better:

"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap."

Is anything human going to be around in 300 years to issue a papal apologia for this generation’s collective crystal sphere orthodoxy? Will there be anybody to apologize to?

I recently had to write mini-bio video scripts for Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and John Young. Young, the modest mouse of the bunch, despite being punished for whistle blowing after the Challenger disaster, stumps tirelessly for NASA, for enhanced funding, because among other things he believes that when our ecosystem comes crashing down around our ears, that we’ll be looking to the rocket men and women to bail our asses outta here. He has continually stumped for NASA to "redo the risk statistics for civilization extinction events and get the word out on what we must do to save the human race over the short or long haul." He characterizes his vision as real science by the people, for the people.

Likely that future apologia will have to come long distance, from space stations or a terraformed Mars. To which my wise, beautiful boy queried, that if we screw this beautiful planet up, do we really deserve another chance? I was far too depressed to answer him but we are taking him and his brother out to Glacier National Park this summer while the glaciers are still there. We owe them at least that much and so much more.

There’s a damned good reason we muzzle our scientists. They’re far scarier than the most apocalyptic artists and writers. Add to which, they’re even harder to understand and just plain downers. And lord knows they’re bad for business. So it goes.

yours in words and ideas

-@v@-